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Democratic Labour Party (DLP) President, Verla De Peiza, is calling on Barbadians to stand up and let their voices be heard in the face of what she calls unprecedented callousness and silence from the present administration.
During Sunday’s St John Branch meeting, De Peiza and the DLP candidate for the parish, Andre Worrell, addressed several party supporters.
According to De Peiza, mixed messaging around the proposed vaccine mandate and the seemingly rushed rollout of the structure of Barbados’s move to be a republic later in the year, have produced unrelenting mental strain upon Barbadians.
De Peiza said tBarbadians deserve a greater say in their own destiny.
“Already once they changed legislation to make sure that one person, the Prime Minister, could make laws in this country under emergency powers, and we have not been under anything but emergency powers since then … So are we to believe that one man will pick a president, [and] will decide who holds the highest office of the land, before we even decide what type of president we want?
“If there is one undercurrent that I am feeling right now, it is that the people of Barbados want a greater say in their destiny. The people of Barbados have a right to consider that they don’t want a figurehead president. The people of Barbados have a right to consider how deep, how far, how wide they want these constitutional changes to be. This is only the second time in our history that we get to speak to the kind of people that we want to be, and we want a document that will be enduring, that centuries from now, this momentous period will be studied and understood. That more than one person made these decisions on behalf of the 280,000 plus people who reside here,” she said.
De Peiza also said that it was her party’s intention to educate Barbadians on the true workings of what it means to achieve republican status, as it was her opinion that the present Mia Mottley administration has left too many citizens in the dark on the true nature of the process.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we contemplate or expect, that it would be done in the vacuum and silence of not hearing the voice and input of the people whose lives it would [impact] … it cannot be, it must not be, and the Democratic Labour party is committed starting from tomorrow at our headquarters. At headquarters tomorrow we will be speaking to the people of Barbados directly about what a republic means, about what their options are. We will step into the void, if your present government is not serving you, put them out,” De Peiza said. (SB)
